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Liberal wind disaster shafted rural Ontario

Toronto Sun
It’s too bad Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government didn’t have its epiphany on the pointlessness of subsidizing any more expensive, unreliable and unneeded wind turbines before it tore apart rural Ontario.

The Liberals’ treatment of rural Ontarians has been a disgrace. They overrode local planning rights by passing the Green Energy Act of 2009 under Wynne’s predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, then rammed industrial wind factories down their throats.

Sometimes, it was hard for people in these communities to believe they were living in a democracy. Rural communities were torn apart — neighbours cashing in by leasing land to wind developers for turbine construction, against neighbours forced to live in the shadow of the mega-structures.

The province received hundreds of complaints about health problems which people believed were being caused by the turbines and suppressed them. During the 2011 election, the CBC reported government documents released under Freedom of Information legislation showed environment ministry staff had issued internal warnings the province needed stricter rural noise limits on turbines, that it had no reliable way to monitor or enforce them and that computer models for determining setbacks were flawed. Read article

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Here’s the rest of the story:
“During the 2011 election, the CBC reported government documents released under Freedom of Information legislation showed environment ministry staff had issued internal warnings the province needed stricter rural noise limits on turbines, that it had no reliable way to monitor or enforce them and that computer models for determining setbacks were flawed.

Ontario Provincial Police showed up at the homes of middle-aged women in one rural community who had never been involved in any form of law-breaking, warning them to keep their demonstrations against wind turbines peaceful.

As we reported, these visits were made at the request of a wind developer. (The government denied any involvement.)

While the Liberals dismissed wind protesters as NIMBYs, they simultaneously cancelled two unpopular natural gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga due to local opposition, at a public cost of $1.1 billion, in what the Tories and NDP dubbed the Liberal seat saver program.

When local residents wrote to Liberal MPPs asking for help in fighting the industrial wind factories imposed on them, they received form letters in reply.

For many rural Ontarians, the Liberal blunder into green energy, launched without any meaningful business plan according to the Auditor General of Ontario — and which wasn’t needed to eliminate coal-fired electricity — wasn’t just a case of their government wasting billions of dollars and sending their electricity bills skyrocketing.

It was a case of their government robbing them of fundamental democratic rights.”

shocked and disgusted….. OPP involvement in “observing” and often “intimidating” the the general public at wind company “Information Meetings” and other public events started years ago. It started, in the case of Haldimand County, with plainclothes OPP officers showing up at a Samsung “Information Meeting” in the Kinsmen Hall in Cayuga followed by uniformed officers, in no less than four cruisers, showing up at a special “dinner”, in Fisherville, for area “farmers” who had signed up to lease parts of their properties to Samsung. The peaceful protesters who appeared on scene were asked to leave or be charged with trespassing. Since a majority of the protesters were residents who had supported, with their tax dollars and other donations, the creation of this venue over the years decided to stay put while others arrived for the dinner. Who paid for the services of the OPP at these gatherings? The taxpayers of Haldimand County or Samsung? Will we ever know? And when, may I ask, was there EVER a protest related to Industrial Wind “Farms” that didn’t remain peaceful and, therefore, require the presence of law enforcement?

You say the police were going to charge them with “trespassing”. What a “nuisance”.

“Too bad” for “victims” who say their “homes” are being “stolen”, that they are being “injured” by the “intentional” acts of wind energy “terrorists”.

Do you know, who is your “Medical Officer of Health”, and how has he dealt with “Complaints” about “Health Hazards” and his “legal” responsibility under “the Ontario Health Protection and Promotion Act”, “Section 11”, “to investigate to determine whether a health hazard exists or does not exist.”

In a truly astonishing assertion yesterday, Wynne claimed in an Ottawa Citizen article that “We now have an electrical grid that is 90% renewable”. Really. Obviously she has deftly redefined renewable to include Nuclear power, something I have urged Ont to do for some years. As for today this definition covers 98% of source generation, wind and solar contributing only minuscule amounts.
Had McGuinty 12 years ago simply emphasized these 3 sources, call them efficient green sources, renewable or whatever, Ont would have been at least $18B ahead and we would have affordable, cost effective, competitive rates, It is a semantics game and the zealots got to define ‘renewable” to exclude nuclear, even though Canada has reserves enough for decades of use. And wind/solar sources paid no role whatever in the elimination of coal power, something she goes on to claim.
If this is the new Liberal party line, then we really have wasted a ton of money building wind plants; but we already know that.

“Pembina’s key approach is conducting analysis and research for publication with an eye to get media coverage to influence government decision-makers and public opinion.”

By definition their research is from the green angle and the influence they seek is designed to further their agenda. Unfortunately media prints their analysis uncritically, (see above post on Wynne) as if they were an unbiased research group. Groups like Pembina have been hugely successful at defining the very language of climate change, “renewable”, “climate change denier” and so on. A complacent media for the most part has allowed this to happen.

“During the 2011 election, the CBC reported government documents released under Freedom of Information legislation showed environment ministry staff had issued internal warnings the province needed stricter rural noise limits on turbines, that it had no reliable way to monitor or enforce them and that computer models for determining setbacks were flawed.”
This is absolutely shocking to me!
No wonder the MOECC has bungled their way through the intense questioning and pleading that people in Huron County have done to address the setback issue and the fact that the noise was outrageous and the low frequency noise modulations and infrasound effects were frightening!
The same canned response was given time and time again by the MOECC that there was nothing to worry about. People’s frightening adverse health effects were denied and ignored consistently!

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This article is the work of the source indicated. The copyright of this article is owned by the author or publisher indicated. Its availability here constitutes a "fair use" as provided for in section 29 of the Canadian Copyright Law as well as in similar "fair dealing" exceptions of the copyright laws of other nations, as part of Ontario Wind Resistance's noncommercial effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a provincial and global audience seeking such information.